Once it was said: if the mountain does not come to Muhammad, Muhammad goes to the mountain. Times, evidently, must have changed a bit: every year tens of thousands of tourists come to Florence from Arab countries to see Michelangelo’s David, that statue so big it looks like a mountain. Perhaps this is why someone in Italy had the idea of bringing to Dubai – where Mohammed’s word is law – a life-size copy of David. Except then realizing that the biblical hero with a dangling sling, down there, offended some sensibilities and then … better “boxed” him in a sort of stairwell.
Incredible but true: it happens in October 2021 at the Dubai Expo, a joyful showcase of what remains of globalization, 170 years after the first universal exhibition, 520 years after the creation of the David and 1,389 years after Muhammad’s death because evidently, after all this time, someone must have noticed that the king (of Israel) is naked. The starting idea was a good one: to place the work of art that, perhaps most of all, represents Italy at the center of the Italian Pavilion. Here then is a beautiful life-size copy (6.72 meters including pedestal), made of 3D printed resin, of the Michelangelo colossus that is on display in the Accademia Gallery.
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But with the installation in progress, according to the rumors of Expo 2020, it was realized that the Adamic representation of the Israelite ruler created some too much embarrassment in the Emirate public. What to do? Too late to fall back on a more chaste equestrian portrait of Gattamelata, too clumsy to put the canvas breeches on the man who, in spite of the odds, defeated Goliath. And then Solomonic solution: we might as well put the statue in a kind of stairwell, with the head visible to all and the pudenda only to fans of the genre. Davide Rampello, curator of the exhibition, denies any kind of pressure: «The David is not seen as it always happens from the bottom up», he reports to Corriere della Sera, «but welcomes visitors looking them in the face. Usually no one can look him in the eye. There have been no government censorships ». Go figure.
However, it would not be the first time that the Italian artistic heritage has bowed to a “Muslim Friendly” logic (you will remember the statues covered, in 2016, at the Capitoline Museums for the visit of the then Iranian president Hassan Rohani), yet it is a little laugh that the story ideally ends a week that, here in Italy, we have largely spent discussing the new statue of the Gleaner of Sapri, for some sexist but perhaps, rather than sexist, just kitsch. Michelangelo’s David is not Sapri’s gleaner, but perhaps we respect it even less. For kitsch, there are no complaints anywhere in the world, otherwise much of Dubai itself would be off limits. Beauty continues to be a stone of scandal. Of course, sooner or later someone will have to explain to us why, every year, tens of thousands of Arabs come to Florence to see the David.